Landsat has celebrated forty-five years of Earth observation this week. The first Landsat mission was Earth Resources Technology Satellite 1 (ERTS-1), which was launched into a sun-synchronous near polar orbit on the 23 July 1972. It wasnâ€™t renamed Landsat-1 until 1975. It had an anticipated life of 1 year and carried two instruments: the Multi Spectral Scanner (MSS) and the Return-Beam Vidicon (RBV).

The Landsat missions have data continuity at their heart, which has given a forty-five year archive of Earth observation imagery. However, as technological capabilities have developed the instruments on consecutive missions have improved. To demonstrate and celebrate this, NASA has produced a great video showing the changing coastal wetlands in Atchafalaya Bay, Louisiana, through the eyes of the different Landsat missions.

In total there have been eight further Landsat missions, but Landsat 6 failed to reach its designated orbit and never collected any data. The missions have been:

Landsat 1 launched on 23 July 1972.

Landsat 2 launched on 22 January 1975.

Landsat 3 was launched on 5 March 1978.

Landsat 4 launched on 16 July 1982.

Landsat 5 launched on 1 March 1984.

Landsat 7 launched on 15 April 1999, and is still active.

Landsat 8 launched on 11 February 2013, and is still active.

Landsat 9 is planned to be launched at the end 2020 and Landsat 10 is already being discussed.

ESA provides Landsat data downlinked via their own data receiving stations; theÂ ESA dataset includes data collected over the open ocean, whereas USGS does not, and the data is processed using ESA’s own processor.

The journey hasn’t always been smooth. Although established by NASA, Landsat was transferred to the private sector under the management of NOAA in the early 1980â€™s, before returning to US Government control in 1992. There have also been technical issues, the failure of Landsat 6 described above; and Landsat 7 suffering a Scan Line Corrector failure on the 31st May 2003 which means that instead of mapping in straight lines, a zigzag ground track is followed. This causes parts of the edge of the image not to be mapped, giving a black stripe effect within these images; although the centre of the images is unaffected the data overall can still be used.

Landsat was certainly a game changer in the remote sensing and Earth observation industries, both in terms of the data continuity approach and the decision to make the data free to access. It has provided an unrivalled archive of the changing planet which has been invaluable to scientists, researchers, book-writers and businesses like Pixalytics.